


Darkly in the Garden of Eden

by TheBitterKitten



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Angst, Beverly Katz is the Best, Beverly deserved better, Canon Compliant, Character Study, Conflicted Will Graham, Dark Will Graham, Episode: s02e13 Mizumono, Hurt No Comfort, M/M, Will Graham Loves Hannibal Lecter, beverly Katz is BAMF, dark times for hannigram, hannibal lecter is a bastard, pov: will graham
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-05
Updated: 2020-11-05
Packaged: 2021-03-08 20:41:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,049
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27362899
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheBitterKitten/pseuds/TheBitterKitten
Summary: Will is balanced precisely on the blade of a knife, between Jack and Hannibal. He falls, but not in either direction.
Relationships: Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter
Comments: 6
Kudos: 22





	Darkly in the Garden of Eden

Will wants to say yes. 

He wants more than anything to curl into him. Follow Hannibal’s suggestion to feed his dogs, leave a note and go to him; disappear into this swirling morass of consuming understanding and calm between them. Walk into the evening hand in hand, to wherever Hannibal has planned.

But his Reckoning still waits like a lion at midday; tail lashing slowly, laconic and swarming with flies in this heat. Every time Will accepts Hannibal’s touch, turns gratefully into his large and delicate hand, Will loses something vital. It’s giving up. It’s something shattering against an iceberg. Each time they confess and see, and but  _see_ each other — it’s welcome. It’s devilry. Black magic. Sweet and sticky heroin, and _welcome_. Something older and darker than themselves, stretching out sanguinary in the orange light of ritual fires. 

It’s all so very much wanted, but tempered, tainted. Corrupted with the suppurated rotting months Will spent in his grave. The time he sat lonely and abandoned and rejected on his bare mattress, but by everyone. Leftto himself alone without his dogs. He cannot reconcile the Hannibal who is the Devil Himself, who orchestrated Will’s acute and specific destruction, with  _ Hannibal,_ his friend, the one who knows him and _wants_ him; this man promising true and terrible beauty, sights beyond even his imagining. A Hannibal who murdered Beverly Katz—

Beverly is herself in her element. Her white coat her armor, her lab her castle as she, a god-king and divine and relentless, peels back the caked layers of unknowing and  _ knows. _Sifts the layers of fibers and scrapings, proudly presents the incontrovertible evidence of deeds.

Bev smiling at him. Cautious, guarded, but smiling.

Beverly interrupting his remembering, his reconstruction of a scene; but with a compliment. Vague approbation.

Beverly puts her hand on his shoulder, heedless of his artifices, adjusts his stance and perfects Will’s aim. He minds— and doesn’t mind it at all.

Bev’s phone number suddenly appears in his contacts as he’s scrolling through to text Hannibal; her wink of unadulterated mischief the only admission of guilt before she returns her attention to the mutilated corpse on her table.

Bev’s friendship is a desert. Punishing. Harsh, but living things can take root and grow tall there. If they’re built for it.

Bev laughing with him, sharing a joke at Zeller’s expense.

_ I saved your life, Graham. I shot a woman for you. You owe me a drink or six and you can’t beg off this time. Come on; I know a place. I’ll even drive you home. _

Bev, flushed with drinks on a Saturday night so late it’s Sunday morning. She tells him a gleefully macabre story about foxes and why she loves them. Dispels the horror of a boy killing his family with neat whiskies and bright-eyed laughter. Her light banishes the darkness for a time in a dim, run-down bar that somehow has 11-year Lagavulin. Will is overwhelmed by the feeling that Bev would do absolutely anything but face her empty apartment and the fact that she may have killed a woman. They take a cab. Will makes up the guest bed upstairs.

When he makes his way focusing precisely down the stairs, hand firmly grasping the rail, Bev is cradling  Buster to her chest.

She’s dancing around Will’s living room to the Motown streaming from her phone on the speakers. The small white dog with an underbite is fit to bursting with happiness, wagging his tail so hard it might fall off as she croons in his ear,  _I come up hard, baby, but that's okay, ‘cause Trouble Man don't get in my way._ Bev’s his favorite; above Alana, above Hannibal. Buster is always the first to greet her on the porch.

They take Will’s car in the morning, sip gingerly at dark and bitter coffee. Relish the silence and the company on the drive.

Will washes the travel mugs that night and finds himself smiling at foxes.

Bev, all concern with no professional curiosity. Just friendly and nothing he deserves, asking if he would tell her if he’s not all right. Because she would. She would trust him with something that dear. But no one trusts him.

Beverly, uncertain and at ends, but turning first to the evidence; with him, right here  _with him_ in this darkness and peril, in a strange bedroom covered in blood.

Bev, smiling at him.

Beverly, her gaze piercing and still hopeful, sharp as foxes, processing his home.

Bev, but damning him. The evidence says everything he doesn’t remember. 

Bev, guilt and anger and hurt welling in her; blood from a deep and fatal wound. This is the FBI and Will shouldn’t have been here. Because  _ now _ what is she supposed to do with her friend and what he’s done?

Beverly, defying her nature, her element, seeking him out. Turning to him, despite all. A matchflame of hope disregarding all the evidence she knows, all she relies on, for  _him_.

Bev, in that sterile prison room, examining the evidence and finding him innocent, unasked, just _knowing_.

Beverly, a god-king on fire, defying his warnings and already succumbed to the thrill and flashing lure, the clarion call of evidence waiting.

_Got you_.

Beverly Katz, throat crushed in Hannibal’s grip and entirely, utterly gone from Will.

Beverly, dead. Lifeless. Her soul ascended, gone away from him, body cooling by degrees in the arctic cold of Hannibal’s freezer.

Bev, subjected to the cruel and unfeeling violence of a band saw.

It _should_ be Bev, there before him. But she’s frozen and lifeless and encased in between glass. Her thawing blood drips to pool beneath the slides. 

It is a revolting nod to her spirit, and it is only snide mockery and disgrace.Base humiliation and complete desecration. There might be a dark beauty to Bev encased by slides, but Will rejects it; retches bodily against it. Denies it. 

It’s some abomination. Displayed for  _him_.

Beverly Katz is gnawingly unwhole. Her kidney is unaccounted for, replaced with an imposter.

And Will just _can’t_.

He wants to, with every screaming fiber of his being, and he can’t. 

So he does what he can. Does the next best thing; he places the call. Hannibal picks up before the first ring ends.

“Hello?”

“They know.”

**Author's Note:**

> The song Bev is singing is “Trouble Man” by Marvin Gaye.
> 
> So my personal theory on Will’s choices (or abstinence from choosing) is less cut and dry than this fic. But he cares quite a lot for Bev, so much so he is actually unable to do what he does until he calls her, living, to his mind.
> 
> I’d love to hear your thoughts!


End file.
